What causes a speedrun timer counting paused and menu time?

The timer accumulates wall-clock or unscaled time, so it keeps ticking while the game is paused or sitting in a menu, inflating run times and making them unfair to compare.

How do I catch this when it only happens for some players?

Capture it automatically from the player's device with the full stack trace, the device and OS, the build, and a breadcrumb trail of what they did. That turns a vague complaint into a specific, reproducible issue you can fix without owning the hardware it happens on.

How to Fix a Speedrun Timer Counting Paused and Menu Time in Godot

Quick answer: Accumulate the timer only during active gameplay using paused-aware delta, stop it on pause and during menus, and resume from the saved elapsed value when play continues.

A fair speedrun timer measures gameplay, not menus. Drive it from pausable game time and stop accumulation whenever the player is not actively playing.

How to fix it

1. Accumulate only in gameplay

Add delta to the run time inside _process only when the game is in the playing state and not paused, instead of computing from Time.get_unix_time_from_system().

2. Stop on pause and menus

When the pause menu or any non-gameplay screen opens, freeze the accumulation. Resume from the stored elapsed value so paused seconds never enter the total.

3. Persist segment times

Store the run's elapsed time across rooms so transitioning levels keeps a single continuous timer, and split per-segment if you want to show level-by-level pace.

Catching the ones you can't reproduce

The hardest version of this to fix is the one you can't reproduce — it only happens on a player's hardware, OS, driver, or save state, under conditions that simply aren't present on your machine. A report that says “it crashed” or “it froze” gives you nothing to act on, so the bug survives release after release while quietly costing you players.

Automatic error capture closes that gap. Each failure arrives with its full stack trace, the device and OS, the build number, and a breadcrumb trail of what the player did right before it broke, so even a failure you have never seen becomes a specific, reproducible issue. Fold identical failures into one signature ranked by how many players each hits, and your worklist sorts itself worst-first instead of arriving as a stream of vague complaints.

This is where a tool like Bugnet earns its place. Its SDK captures every Godot error automatically with the full stack trace plus device, OS, memory, build, and game-state context, folds duplicates into one grouped issue with an occurrence count, and ties each to the build it first appeared on — so you fix the problem that hurts the most players first and confirm it is gone when its signature disappears from the next release.

The errors you never hear about are the ones quietly costing you players. Visibility turns them into a worklist.